1. Johann Ludwig Casper, Handbook of Forensic Medicine, trans. from 3rd edn by G. W. Balfour, vol. 2 (London: New Sydenham Society, 1862), pp. 279–80. Emphasis in original. For contemporary examples of cases involving pregnant women with intact hymens and virgins with congenitally absent hymens, one of which was provided by an Exeter-based correspondent, see: ‘Notes, Short Comments, and Answers to Correspondents’, The Lancet, 3 November 1888, 898–900, p. 899; ‘Physical Signs of Virginity’, The Lancet, 15 July 1865, 84, p. 84.
2. Alfred Swaine Taylor, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, 8th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1866 [1844]), pp. 602–05. For an extensive discussion of the value and problems of the hymen as a sign see ‘The Physical Signs of Virginity’, British Medical Journal (BMJ), 5 January 1895, 27, p. 27. For a historiographical discussion of the problematic nature of the hymen in nineteenth-century medico-legal thought.
3. Ivan Crozier and Gethin Rees, ‘Making a Space for Medical Expertise: Medical Knowledge of Sexual Assault and the Construction of Boundaries between Forensic Medicine and the Law in late Nineteenth-Century England’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 8 (2012), 285–304, pp. 301–3l.
4. Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Unripe” Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England’ in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 131–50, pp. 132, 141; Louise A. Jackson, ‘Child Sexual Abuse and the Law: London 1870–1914’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Roehampton Institute (1997), p. 180.
5. Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 6.